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Comment by nielsbot | Hacker News Reader

I thought VS Code was Atom? (well, a fork of)

No, it's not a fork. They both run on Electron, so they share a common runtime environment, but they share no editor code.

Wasn't Electron created for Atom? If so, VSCode is at least using a part of Atom.

I mean, by that argument Windows uses Unix because C was written for Unix.

At least historically Windows used different parts of UNIX. i.e. they used BSD's TCP/IP stack for quite some time. Also used "UNIX services for Windows" and recently added the Windows subsystem for Linux.

That doesn't make Electron _a part_ of Atom. If I build my application on top of Linux, my application is not _a part_ of Linux.

Electron is its own application framework, that Atom builds itself on top of. Electron is not a text editor framework, no more than QT or Cocoa is.

It is _very_ fair to say VSCode is using Electron - heavily, in fact! But saying VSCode is using part of Atom is just not true, and implies VSCode is building atop the Atom editor, which it does not.

VSCode is built on top of the same framework as Atom, Electron, which was previously called Atom-shell.

It's worth noting that the core contributors to Electron are Github employees.

That gives the acquisition a very different perspective.

What if MS is really buying Electron? It’s something they’ve been using a lot in all their recent products, and it’s a key technology in the contemporary development landscape. Making it more Windows-friendly would definitely help them.

Improving Electron can be done far cheaper and easier than acquiring a company.

The only thing GitHub has that Microsoft can't easily get on their own is the user base. That's what this acquisition will be about.

But controlling a leading platform so completely isn't cheap.

They can also ensure the next electronconf isn't cancelled. Everyone wins!

Well, answering myself... Looks like it uses the Electron Shell project which was part of Atom

https://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/04/30/microsofts-cross-plat...

No, not at all. The only common component (I think) is Electron (Atom shell).

It’s not. They are both web-based but otherwise unrelated.

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